In recent years, wireless local area networks (LANs) representative of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 have been widely used. In addition, the number of wireless LAN-compatible products (hereinafter, also referred to as wireless communication devices) have also increased in accordance with this. In contrast, wireless communication resources available for communication are limited. Therefore, it is desirable to increase the efficiency of communication between wireless communication devices.
As an example of technologies for improving efficiency of communication, there is a technology of reducing the overheads using a physical layer (PHY) frame. Specifically, there is a technology of transmitting an aggregated frame that is obtained by aggregating a plurality of media access control (MAC) frames as PHY frames. In this manner, there are fewer PHY headers as compared with a case in which MAC frames are stored in individual PHY frames and are transmitted.
In addition, there are cases in which it is not always necessary to return an acknowledgement (ACK) for a transmitted frame. On the contrary, there is also concern that an improvement in efficiency of communication will be reduced if an ACK is returned for all transmission frames.
Meanwhile, Patent Literature 1, for example, discloses a wireless communication device in which a bitmap indicating an ACK policy for a plurality of MAC frames is stored in a MAC super frame that has a plurality of MAC frames, and if an MAC super frame is received, an ACK frame is transmitted in accordance with the bitmap.
Note that a wireless communication device that transmits an ACK frame generally waits to resend a frame that has been failed to be received. According to IEEE 802.11 standards, for example, sequence numbers are managed for each traffic stream, and data with sequential sequence numbers is provided to a higher-order layer. Therefore, in a case in which a part of the sequence numbers is missing, the wireless communication device waits for resending of the MAC frame that has data corresponding to this part of the sequence numbers until the MAC frame is successfully received.